From: [email protected]
Rebecca,
Thanks for taking my call. Herewith, as discussed, the CV for Laura Brown. Laura’s very keen to meet Constance for this position, and to discuss all the requirements Constance has. She’s a fabulous candidate, only recently become available for new work, as her previous employer has moved country. He was very sad to lose her! Laura is extremely dependable, personable and an all-rounder, and we think she’d make an excellent, adaptable fit for your client.
Kind regards, and looking forward to hearing from you.
I didn’t sign it. Rebecca might put it down to distraction on my part thanks to my fictional fractious baby, and before I could back out of it, I pressed send. What easy madness. I pushed the laptop shut and went out for a walk, as if to leave the incriminating equipment behind might exonerate my deception and desperation. I wandered round the small park at the end of our road for fifteen minutes, and when I got back to the flat, Joe was sitting on the sofa, flicking through a monthly food magazine. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Have you got any thoughts on dinner?’
‘Hello,’ I said, sitting next to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek. ‘Nope.’
Joe didn’t react. ‘Did you meet up with Kelly?’ he said. ‘Is she going to stream the birth on Instagram?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. But then I wondered. ‘Mad she’s having another baby. They always say it happens at thirty. But I definitely didn’t want a kid at thirty.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Joe.
‘You didn’t either.’
‘They,’ said Joe. ‘Who are they? It happens when it happens.’
I knew he didn’t understand what I was talking about, not really. Joe’s body had never truly changed for him. Yes, it had got hairier, bigger – but inside and out, it had more or less stayed the same. For me, who had been shocked by the first, unfamiliar melting ache in my lower abdomen when I was twelve, by the blood that came, completing my A-levels five years later, bent double in agony – I, who had waxed and waned like the moon, month in, month out, who knew the differing levels of wetness inside her could supposedly predict her fertility – I knew the inside of my body so much better than he knew his. Strangers on the street hadn’t scrutinized his body like they had mine. And now I was at a point where my body might fail in its performance of the act of producing another person before it was too late.
‘I miss the passion, Joe,’ I said suddenly. ‘Between you and me.’
‘Yeah,’ he replied, but I couldn’t tell whether in agreement, defeat, or both. ‘But you can’t keep that up.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t know how anyone does.’
‘People do, though,’ I said. I wondered what a lot of sex actually was, in terms of quantity.
‘If you had a baby, what would you call it?’ Joe said, closing the magazine.
We’d had this conversation before, and usually it was very abstract in its tone, hypothetical, distant. But there was something in his voice that alarmed me.
‘It’s hard thinking of a name when you haven’t met the person,’ I said. ‘But it would have to be something that wouldn’t get them teased. Something that isn’t about me. I just don’t get why people give weird names to their kids. Giving your child a batshit name is so unfair.’ Joe looked amused. ‘What? I feel strongly about it.’
‘So I see.’
‘Oh, people can name their kids whatever they want. Yellow, Hamburger, Dandelion. Who am I to judge?’
‘Hamburger’s nice.’
‘Hammie! Get off that swing!’
‘It’s got a ring to it.’
We laughed. We could get on. We did. Anyone looking at us right then, on our sofa, might have thought, Yes, they’ve got it nailed. And maybe we had. Maybe the perpetual acts of compromise and the feelings of frustration, a chronic sense that somewhere round the corner – or behind you on the path where you missed the turning – your real life was waiting, was simply a condition of being alive, and moreover, trying to be alive with someone else?
If you’d asked me, Do you love Joe? I would have answered yes. But I did not love the person I was when I was with him. I did not like how I’d . . . slid, over the years. I was convinced that there were many other selves belonging to me that were locked inside and would be forever locked if I stayed on this path – this steady path, my hand in his. My dad had never put himself to any long-term test before Claire, so I had no precedent of how people negotiated the peaks and slumps of an entire lifetime together – the dulling acts, the imperative to find grace in repetition, in flaws, in boredom.
I loved my past with Joe, but inside this present we’d reduced ourselves in order to fit its shape. I felt the tinge of sabotage in my blood. If I let it, would it spread? And at the same time, I wanted to apologize – for not being enthusiastic any more about Joerritos, for never knowing what I wanted, for not being someone even a bit like Kelly.
‘Joey, how are you feeling about the whole baby thing?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. He paused. ‘Is it a good time?’ he went on. ‘With me and the business?’
What fucking business? I wanted to scream. I couldn’t believe how deep we were into the delusion. It felt like there was no way out.
He looked hard at the carpet, as if to divine his future in the microscopic tufts. ‘How are you feeling about it?’ he said. ‘Do you want to have a baby?’
I looked at him. I knew that I had begun to play a guessing game with Nature, like a walk on Escher’s staircase, where you might wander and never end up anywhere concrete. Older women would often say to me, You can’t mess with Nature! as if Nature was a prickly colleague called Janet, with pernickety rules, but who they grudgingly admitted was good at her job. Those women could afford to be complacent, old-wivey, slightly hectoring. They saw it as the right of those who were stuck with their decisions, wanted or otherwise, and had done their best.
‘A baby is the one thing I can’t take back to the shop, Joey,’ I said. ‘The one thing I will have done in my life which is utterly irreversible.’
‘I know that, babe.’
‘It’s also expensive. We’re lucky, with the fact that we have the flat, but it’s only got one bedroom.’
‘You can put a baby in a drawer,’ he said.
‘Be serious. London costs a fortune.’
But cost was not the reason I was worried. When I was a schoolgirl the talk was determinedly not about babies. It was about other kinds of achievement, those from outside the body. Degrees, usefulness, wings attached with wax, soaring up towards the sun. Most of my friends had been like me, mythical women, wax-winged. But one by one they’d become pregnant and had their children – so beautiful, all of them – and they had used the old feathers on their wings for nests. I had never felt jealous or sorrowful when the news came. I’d always felt delight and excitement – and a not insubstantial relief that this time, it wasn’t me. I could enjoy these children and then go home at the end of the day.